For Parents Only
For Parents Only – Getting Inside the Head of your Kid
Shaunti Feldhahn, Lisa A. Rice

Reviewer Ashley Merrill

Authors of the bestseller, For Women Only, it’s not mystery that their current book will be similarly popular.  For Parents Only is an amazing tool for parents of any aged child to read.  Even though their focus is on teenage children, it can really help any age child, and help a parent who doesn’t have teenagers yet to see what they should expect.       

Broken up into sections, this book touches on everything from attitude to freedom to taking charge.  There is information on why kids close themselves off emotionally to their parents, why kids snap, and why kids try to hard to be different than their parents.  To help make their point, Shaunti and Lisa display questionnaires throughout this book to show how many teens answered one way or the other to certain questions.  That way, if you missed it in the text, it is spelled out for you in the graph.  What I also really like about this book is that it gives you lots of information straight from the horses mouth; the teens that is.  There are many, many quotes about why they act the way they do and what they are looking for in their parents.  The answers are shocking.  If teens and parents could take a few minutes to sit down and discuss their actions and feelings there would be much less frustration in the relationship.

I was not a big fan of a sentence or two being repeated every few pages in bigger font to sum up what was being talked about in that section.  I found that I would read the page, then see the bigger font and read it, and realized it said exactly what I had just read.  I found it to get in the way and ended up just skipping it whenever it came up. I was also not a big fan of how religious teens, ie protestant Christians, were compared to non protestant Christians. During one of the QandA survey’s they did, the authors compared the two groups and made it appear as though the religious group produced better teens. I found myself turned off from it and feeling very defensive.  Luckily that was only done once or twice and the rest of the book was absolutely amazing and a must have for anyone with kids or who plans on having kids.

I would highly recommend this book to any and all people and think the fluid style of writing and to the point comments will really help to change some families for the better. 

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